Biographies

Robert Krulwich
Praised as "the most inventive network reporter in television" by TV Guide, NOVA scienceNOW host and executive editor Robert Krulwich got his start with Pacifica Radio. From there he moved to NPR's "All Things Considered" for a famously creative stint as a business and economics reporter, then successfully translated his unique reporting style to CBS "This Morning" in 1984 and to ABC News a decade later. Krulwich returns frequently to PBS, notably to Frontline and recently as host of NOVA's "Cracking the Code of Life," an award-winning two-hour program on the human genome. Krulwich received a bachelor's degree in U.S. history from Oberlin College and a law degree from Columbia Law School. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.Law School. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

Michael Brown
Geology and Planetary Science professor Michael Brown is head of Caltech's Planetary Astronomy Group, which investigates our solar system and the solar neighborhood primarily through surface and spacecraft-based observation. His research activities include the exploration of the outer solar system and extra-solar planetary systems.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, where he also teaches. His professional research interests include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our Milky Way. In addition to dozens of professional publications, Tyson continues to write for the public as a monthly essayist for Natural History magazine, and has hosted and appeared in several NOVA programs.

Russell Charif
Russell Charif is the coordinator for the acoustic search effort for the ivory-billed woodpecker. A research biologist in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Bioacoustics Research Program (BRP), he has worked on studies of acoustic communication and acoustically based population monitoring in several species of birds as well as in elephants and whales. He has also been involved in the design, testing, and documentation of specialized software developed at BRP for analysis of animal sounds.

Melanie Driscoll
Melanie Driscoll is a Volunteer Sound Analyst for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She has participated in the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker since 2004.

John Fitzpatrick
John Fitzpatrick is coleader of the ivory-billed woodpecker search effort in Arkansas and has been the director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology since 1995. Previously, he was executive director of Florida's Archbold Biological Station and curator of birds at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Fitzpatrick is the author of Neotropical Birds: Ecology and Conservation and has been engaged in applying science to real-world conservation issues throughout his career.

Tim Gallagher
Tim Gallagher was one of the first three searchers to see and identify an ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas in 2004, and has returned more than a half dozen times to continue the search for the bird. For 15 years he has served as the editor-in-chief of Living Bird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's award-winning quarterly magazine. A professional wildlife photographer, Gallagher traveled through many of the ivory-billed woodpecker's former haunts, searching for evidence of the species' continued existence and interviewing people who have had credible sightings.

Jerome Jackson
Jackson is Professor of Biology at Florida Gulf Coast University. His research interests include the behavioral ecology of vertebrate endangered species, niche dynamics of birds, and the history of science in these areas. He has received honors from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The American Ornithologist's Union, and the Explorer's Club. Jackson cohosted a weekly nature-oriented television segment called "Southern Outdoors" on CBS and currently produces a daily segment called "With the Wild Things" on public radio.

David Luneau
David Luneau is Professor of Electronics & Computer Engineering Technology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is currently among a team of 50 experts and field biologists who have collected evidence of the bird's existence during an intensive search conducted by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and The Nature Conservancy. On April 25, 2005, Luneau captured the only known video footage of the ivory-billed woodpecker as it took off from the trunk of a tree.

Carla Wohl
NOVA scienceNOW correspondent Carla Wohl is an award-winning broadcast journalist who has been telling stories on TV for more than two decades. She has reported on the launch of the space shuttle Discovery, witnessed SpaceshipOne's race to space in the Mojave desert, covered Jet Propulsion Laboratory missions to Mars, explored the different ways medicine affects men and women, and weathered El Nino and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters.

Kanta Subbarao
Kanta Subbarao joined the National Institutes of Health's Laboratory of Infectious Diseases as a Senior Investigator in 2002. Her research focuses on the development of vaccines against pandemic strains of influenza and the evaluation of vaccines against the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus. Before working at the NIH, she was Chief of the Molecular Genetics Section of the Influenza Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.

Robert Lilienfeld
Robert Lilienfeld is President of The Cygnus Group, an Ann Arbor-based environmental consulting firm. He also serves as Director of the newly formed Center for Informed Decision Making, which is part of the Corporate Environmental Management Program at the University of Michigan . His work in the areas of source reduction and waste prevention are known internationally.

Jason Matheny
Jason Matheny is a Ph.D. student in Agricultural Policy at the University of Maryland and a researcher at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, where he studies the health and environmental consequences of animal agriculture. He directs New Harvest, a nonprofit that funds research on in vitro meat, and previously worked on public health projects for the World Bank and the Center for Global Development.

Father Thomas Berg
Father Thomas Berg is associate professor of moral philosophy at the Center for Higher Studies of the Legion of Christ in Thornwood, NY. His areas of interest include natural law theory, personhood theory, and biomedical issues dealing with the beginning of human life. He is also founder of the Westchester Institute.

Arthur Caplan
Arthur Caplan is Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and the Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His research interests include transplantation ethics, genetics, reproductive technologies, health policy, and general bioethics. Caplan writes a regular column on bioethics for MSNBC.com. He is a frequent guest and commentator for National Public Radio, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post,The Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other media outlets.

Julia Cort
A member of the WGBH Science Unit since 1991, Julia Cort has been a writer/producer on over 20 NOVAs, including "The Elegant Universe" with Brian Greene and "Life's Greatest Miracle". She's trekked the forests of Siberia to film the long-lost bones of the last Russian tsar and attempted to recreate the technological wonders of Egyptian pharaohs by raising 30-ton granite obelisks. Her work has been honored with the George Foster Peabody Award, the AAAS Science Journalism Award, and the News and Documentary Emmy.

George Daley
George Daley is Associate Director of the Stem Cell/Developmental Biology research program at Children's Hospital Boston and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. One of the nation's leading stem cell researchers, Daley studies therapeutic cloning as a potential replacement for marrow transplants in treating diseases like sickle cell anemia. Daley conducted research that led to the development of Gleevac, a drug treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia.

William Hurlbut
William Hurlbut is a physician and Consulting Professor in the Program in Human Biology at Stanford University. His primary areas of interest involve the ethical issues associated with advancing biomedical technology, the biological basis of moral awareness, and studies in the integration of theology and philosophy of biology. In addition to teaching at Stanford, he currently serves on the Presidents Council on Bioethics.

Rudolf Jaenisch
Rudolf Jaenisch is a Founding Member of the Whitehead Institute and a pioneer of transgenic science, in which researchers alter an animal's genetic makeup to produce a variant of a human disease. Jaenisch has focused on creating transgenic mice that enable his lab to study forms of cancer and neurological diseases that have long baffled researchers. Jaenisch has coauthored more than 300 research papers and has received numerous prizes and recognitions, including an appointment to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.

Chad Cohen
Chad Cohen comes to NOVA scienceNOW after nearly four years as a science correspondent and producer for the National Geographic Channel. He has searched for lost cities under the slums of Cairo, juggled weightlessness and nausea in NASA's "vomit comet," and, most recently, was charged by an Asian one-horned rhino while he was investigating India's wild elephants.

Kerry Emmanuel
Kerry Emmanuel is Professor of Tropical Meteorology and Climate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research focuses on the prediction of hurricane intensity by isolating the essential physics of hurricanes, which include the thermodynamic state of the atmosphere and upper ocean and the wind structure of the surrounding atmosphere.

Christopher Landsea
Having grown up in South Florida, Christopher Landsea learned to respect hurricanes at an early age. Today, he is the Science and Operations officer at the National Hurricane Center, where he conducts research into the seasonal and climatic relationships of Atlantic tropical cyclones, African Sahel rainfall and the El Nino-Southern Oscillation. In the process, he has flown into more than a dozen hurricanes aboard the NOAA P-3 aircraft, including Hurricanes Gilbert (1988) and Opal (1995).

Peter Webster
As professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Peter Webster researches low-frequency atmospheric and ocean dynamics, ocean-atmosphere interactions, and wave propagation through complex flows. He is the recipient of numerous professional awards, including the Royal Society's Adrian Gill Medal and the Americam Meterological Society's Carl Gustav Rossby Research award.

Ruth Berggren
Ruth Berggren is an associate professor of medicine and an infectious diseases specialist at Charity Hospital and Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans. She is board-certified in both Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases with significant experience and particular interest in clinical AIDS research, as well as in implementing HIV care in resource-poor countries. Berggren grew up in the Artibonite Valley of central Haiti, just one hour away from Mirebalais, at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital. She is fluent in both Haitian Creole and French.

Michael Brumlik
Michael Brumlik currently performs molecular studies to identify components of the MAP-kinase signal transduction pathway in Toxoplasma gondii at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Tyler Curiel
Tyler Curiel is Section Chief of the Hematology and Medical Oncology Research Laboratories at Tulane University School of Medicine. He currently treats adult patients with hematologic malignancies, leukemias, lymphomas, multiple myelomas as well as ovarian cancer and hepatitis C. Curiel's current research includes trials for ovarian cancer and a prostate cancer vaccine.